Miami Heat: Brian Grant Has Parkinson's Disease

May 18, 2009|Posted by Ethan J. Skolnick on May 18, 2009 06:35 PM

DAVIE — Wow. This is stunning news.

ESPN's Ric Bucher has written a story about Brian Grant, who has early on-set Parkinson's Disease. He is just 37 years old. This is the guy who was thrust into a different role here (center) as a result of Alonzo Mourning's kidney disease. And this is the third jarring story this month -- after the deaths of Chuck Daly and Wayman Tisdale -- about one of the game's true gentlemen.

Grant is on the short list of the favorite people that I've covered. Intelligent. Honest. Hard-working. Charitable. He may not lived up to the contract here, but it wasn't from a lack of trying.

This is a story that I wrote in 2000 for the Miami Herald, after Grant's acquisition from Portland.

August 27, 2000 Sunday FINAL EDITION PLANTING HOPE, QUIETLY

It was late, and they were alone again, Miguel Reyes, his wife, their daughter and her illness. They did not long for visitors. Three years earlier, Jovita's leukemia had returned after three years in remission, and the Reyes family had since been visited by seizures, infections and worst-case scenarios.

Sure, people visited, too, those times when Jovita wasn't in isolation after her bone marrow transplant. A few weeks earlier, a member of the Portland Trail Blazers had stopped by as part of a group. He seemed concerned, but that wasn't unusual. Concern had never translated into tangible assistance before, though. So Miguel Reyes had forgotten him.

But then this night, unexpectedly, the basketball player visited again.

"It was a vision of a man, not much light, down a hallway, a tall man, in white satin," Reyes said. "It wasn't a man I saw, not a man like I was used to. It was like an angel."

An angel in dreadlocks, with ice packs on his knees. A 6-9, 260-pound, bruising power forward of an angel who is about to become a member of the Miami Heat, in a trade expected to be finalized this week.

Brian Grant had come straight from a game to visit Jovita and offer help, money perhaps. Reyes, a boarding school administrator and wrestling coach, sought something more significant. He asked if Grant would help guide his son, because Reyes and his wife, Cassandra, were so busy with Jovita.

He didn't expect Grant would start picking Ramon up, organizing paintball outings, entertaining him at his house on the four days each week that Ramon (then 16) would drive into Portland for wrestling practice. He didn't expect that Grant would spearhead a drive to get Jovita a $15,000 wheelchair van so she wouldn't be stuck in the house, and could still get ice cream and go to the movies even when she was bloated because of medication. He didn't expect that Grant's wife, Gina, would become a big sister to Jovita, offering advice about modeling, relationships and cheerleading.

Reyes couldn't expect this because he didn't know about all Grant had done: the 90-minute trips for eight months to visit a brain cancer-stricken boy named Dash; the tireless work to sign up possible donors for a bone-marrow transplant for a boy named Woody; the repeated visits to the Ronald McDonald House in a Hummer full of food; the funeral he paid for for a murdered foster child.

Reyes didn't know Grant, 28, grew up poor in small Georgetown, Ohio, laying sticks in tobacco fields for $3 per hour, watching his father and uncle weld boxcars, learning about charity. He didn't know that a young Grant had spent several weeks in the hospital with pneumonia, or that he now had three children of his own.

Reyes knows it now, though, knows all about this selfless man. And South Florida will soon know him, too. * What is the real purpose of organized sport? Community pride? And what brings each community more pride, wins or relationships?

It is quite possible that the Trail Blazers improved themselves in a basketball sense in the three-team deal that will send Grant, who was hobbled last season, to Miami, the Heat's Clarence Weatherspoon and Chris Gatling to Cleveland, and the Cavaliers' Shawn Kemp to Portland. The trade will bring yet another big-name player to the Heat, which earlier this summer acquired All-Star Eddie Jones and Anthony Mason.

The basketball effect of this latest deal remains to be seen. What is certain is that Portland, the community, is pained to lose Grant after three years.

"It's a shame to me that the organization would not be more concerned with the influence of their players than with just getting a ring," said Pastor Steven Holt of Fellowship Church, to which Grant belongs. "What they don't seem to understand is fan loyalty, fan involvement, city concerns. Who cares if our church has the greatest music program? If we don't care about the people in our congregation, our church is going to be empty. Brian did a lot to change the attitude about the Trail Blazers."